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CHRISTIANITY AND THE PRESENT 
WORLD SITUATION 



The First Annual Address before the Scholarship 
Society of Southwestern University at George- 
town, delivered on June 10th, 1916. 




- BY- 
GEORGE CHARLES BUTTE, M. A., J. U. D. 

Associate Professor of Law in the 
University of Texas 

AUSTIN 1916 



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MR. PRESIDENT, LADIES AND GENTLEMEN: 

Christianity has failed ! Civilization is bankrupt ! The pres- 
ent world organization is inadequate! The human race has 
fallen over a precipice and lies in the abyss of despair. Whither 
shall we turn for salvation? This is the disconsolate, solemn 
plaint that is going up from a million bleeding hearts in all 
parts of the globe. It reaches even to our pampered dull ears 
from the blood drenched steppes of Russia and the pitiless 
marshes of the Tigris, from the holocaust trenches in sunny 
France and the icy wastes of the Balkan mountains. It rises 
like a moan from the ruins of devastated cities and like a dirge 
from all the seas, where noble and innocent lives lie frozen in 
watery graves. Belgium is enslaved, Armenia— Christian Ar- 
menia — is ravished and dishonored! The flower of the human 
race are arrayed in steel with murder in their hearts. 0, 
Church of the Living Christ, wake up ! How can these things 
be? 

Christianity, or the thing that we called and believed to be 
Christianity before August 1, 1914, is on trial! And it is not 
only those whose hearts are torn that are putting it on trial. 
It's you — it's I — we, in this placid land of plenty — that are 
putting this faith on trial! Consciously or unconsciously, we 
too are asking in this hour of the world's calamity: "Whither 
shall we turn for salvation?" Rest assured, those agonizing 
souls across the several seas are seeking and finding a/jiew and 
a profounder faith ! Human life will henceforth have a differ- 
ent meaning for them. What will be our verdict? Will we 
be content with our spiritual status quo of August 1, 1914? 

My thoughts will group themselves about four questions? 
1. What is the present world situation? 2. What is the re- 
sponsibility of the Christian Church for the present world situ- 
ation ? 3. What will the future world situation be ? 4. What 
part will we play in the future world situation? 

I. I was in London when the Austrian heir apparent Arch- 
duke Francis Ferdinand and his consort were assassinated at 



— 2— 

Sarajevo on June 28, 1914. The event excited no special con- 
cern amongst the English people, nor did it rouse them to any 
special commiseration. General indifference characterized their 
attitude. They were absorbed with business and, at that sea- 
son, with holiday preparations. No one thought of war, unless 
it was the foreign office, and they kept their own counsel. I 
attended church at St. Paul's the following Sunday and heard 
a sermon which I have long ago forgotten. Two weeks later I 
was in Paris. If the Parisians were dancing on a magazine of 
melinite, they seemed blissfully unconscious of it. To them 
the world was moving on its gay old way. M. Poincare was 
visiting the Tsar in St. Petersburg, and the Kaiser was cruis- 
ing in the fjords of Norway. Who said war? Par exemple! 
The French provincial wasn't roused even a moment from his 
notorious apathy toward politics. The sun was shining in his 
wheat fields and his vines gave prospect of a large yield in the 
Fall. The Parisians, who ought to know, were still dancing 
and drinking — why should he worry? 

It was late in July when I rejoined my family at Heidelberg. 
Scenting the danger, I went to the bank in which I kept a de- 
posit and wrote a check for my balance. I said, "Pay me in 
gold." The sum was considerable, so the teller called the man- 
ager who sought to disuade me from withdrawing the money. 
I told him I feared war and a moratorium and I was leaving 
for home in a month anyway. "Nonsense, there'll be no war — 
it will, all' blow over. The business interests won't allow it." 
I wanted to be courteous, as they had always been kind to me, 
so I told him I would think it over till next day. When I was 
on the street again, I paused to listen to the talk of groups of 
people here and there. The tone wasn't reassuring, and when I 
heard a small coterie of laboring men (of all men!) denouncing 
the Kaiser for his deliberately withholding the order for a gen- 
eral mobilization when every day's delay cost them so much 
and helped the enemy correspondingly, I turned right back to 
the bank and unyieldingly demanded instant payment. Four 
days later was the fateful first of August. The world exploded ! 



What is the situation today? Thirteen nations, including seven 
of the eight Great Powers, are engaged in a struggle of annihila- 
tion. Destruction, death, deepest misery everywhere! The 
whole of Europe is in arms. The whole of Africa, except the 
tiny negro Republic of Liberia, is war area. The whole of Asia 
is seething and China is in a state of revolution bordering on 
anarchy. The war area extends even to our hemisphere and 
takes in portions of both Americas. The rest of our hemisphere 
is in a ferment and our own beloved country, the last hope of 
mankind, stands on the brink of war with a sister republic. And 
let us not in our supposed security delude ourselves that this new 
war will be confined to the original belligerents ! The whole world 
is at the ignition point ! Oh, the terror and woe of it all ! And 
the pity of it, Oh, the pity of it, that in such a brief time the 
beautiful structure of international comity and co-operation 
which was rising in such majesty and splendor during the past 
two decades, has been dashed to pieces! And shall War's Iron 
Broom sweep out the very last fragments? Let me hasten to 
answer. No, a thousand times No! Above all nations is hu- 
manity; above humanity is God! 

II. What is the responsibility of the Christian Church for 
this awful world cataclysm? Alas, a very heavy one! I am 
speaking of the whole Christian family and of no particular 
branch of it ; and if I condemn anyone, I would mostly condemn 
myself. 

The Christian Church for the past generation has been los- 
ing its power over the hearts of men. It has been losing its 
grip — i e t us be honest — on you and me! This is no new dis- 
covery. Acute observers have long known that the modern 
Church hasn't satisfied the wants of men. Men have abandoned 
her and are satisfying themselves with other things. Go into 
our largest cities and see the diminutive congregations! One 
Sunday a few months before the war I attended a service in the 
great cathedral of Cologne in the heart of Catholic Germany. 
The little group of worshippers and the great absent host 
were castigated by the priest for not coming to confessional in 



one of the most pitiful and violent diatribes I ever heard from 
a pulpit. The spirit of the Psalmist who sang, "For a day in 
thy courts is better than a thousand, ' ' no longer meets with any 
hearty response. The world has preferred "to dwell in the 
tents of wickedness." One Sunday afternoon in Paris, I was 
crossing the Place St. Sulpice and observed the facade of the 
great cathedral of that name, the richest on the left bank of the 
Seine, gaily decorated. I entered and found high mass in pro- 
gress with a pomp and ceremony I had never witnessed before. 
A whole college of priests, the altars aflame with a thousand 
candles, incense and perfume floating through the vaulted arches. 
And a chorus of voices such as I had never heard in Paris ! The 
service was led by an archbishop, specially sent from Rome ! A 
great, solemn occasion ! I eagerly listened for a great spiritual 
appeal, for here the whole pomp and power of the Church was 
being put into play for some great purpose. The mountain la- 
bored, a mouse came forth. The archbishop had come to take 
up a collection for the repairs on the tower of the cathedral 
that had been begun and were left unfinished for more than two 
years ! In the year 1914, there was more money spent on alco- 
holic liquors in the United States than was spent by the entire 
Christian Church in the world for all purposes of every kind 
whatsoever for the past one hundred years! "Is it not a com- 
ment on the hollowness of the Church's pretensions," is the 
bitter criticism of a recent writer, "that as civilization has ad- 
vanced, the church has receded and that annually her remain- 
ing millions ooze away and are lost in secular affairs ? — For nine- 
teen centuries society has left in the hands of the Church the 
direction of the moral forces of the world. And now, after all 
these centuries, we find ourselves falling into the same moral 
vacuum into which the world empire of the Romans fell. After 
eighteen hundred years it is as easy for men to thrust bayonets 
into one another as it was in the heathen world. ' ' 

Why has the Christian Church lost her vitality and her pow- 
er? Let us answer in all charity toward others, but in severe 
judgment upon ourselves. 1. Because Christians, laity and 



— — 

clergy, are contaminated with worldliness. We have made an 
altar of Baal of the altar of the Most High! 2. Because of 
inefficient spiritual leadership. We have too many small minds 
in the pulpit and too much molly-coddle, namby-pamby preach- 
ing. ' ' Where there is no vision, the people perish. " " The aver- 
age clergyman fails to inspire his flock because he has nothing 
to give them out of the storehouse of his own personal exper- 
ience. " To quote the phrase of an English clergyman: "We are 
fed with the tritest platitudes. " Is it any wonder we are anemic 
souls without deep spiritual convictions? 3. The Christian 
Churches, with wilful blindness, have denied the intellectual 
problems they could not solve and they have evaded the moral 
difficulties to which they had no answer. Thus the Christian 
conscience has been falsified, and men have forced their faith 
into accord with their knowledge or their knowledge into ac- 
cord with their faith. With a consistent bigotry, the Catholic 
Church under the present Pope, has set itself against the hope- 
ful movement in the Church to reconcile dogma with science, 
known as Modernism. During the past winter a great denomi- 
national State Convention met in Austin and with equal bigotry 
denounced as heretical a text-book on physical geography that 
makes only the most casual reference to the doctrine of evolution. 
To generalize, we have been making a severance between re- 
ligion and life, a severance for which the Churches are largely 
accountable. We have made Christianity a sect, a great, a noble 
sect — still a sect. It is merely one of the religions of the world, 
along with Buddhism, Shintoism, Islam and all the rest. We 
have refused to admit that all truth is related, be it in nature, 
in life, in science, in art, in the realm of the Seen or the Un- 
seen; and we have set off to itself the thing we call Religion. 
This saintliest of the Muses shall have no communion with her 
worldly sisters! This severance between Religion and Life has 
to be healed, and the remedy lies in perfect honesty on both 
sides. ' ' We shall then be able step by step to bring our human 
aims and needs into accord with our spiritual ideals — but only 
in so far as we are permitted to recognize a contradiction where 



-6— 



we find it, and to accept any occasional discords as the transi- 
tional chords (never to be lingered upon) that go to the making 
of an eternal harmony." 

4. The war has revealed a fourth weakness. The Christian 
Church is too deistic and too little Christian! The numerous 
bombastic imperial proclamations, issued by the Tsars, the Em- 
perors, the Kings, in the course of this war illustrate what I 
mean. They are full of the use — or misuse — of the name of God, 
but the name of the Son is conspicuous by its absence in all 
of them. As has been said, "The Christianity of these profess- 
edly Christian nations has become a sort of Deism with an un- 
revealed God expressing the national aspirations or the views 
of the ruling powers. God alone may be whatever we choose 
to make Him ; but not so God as revealed in Christ Jesus ! ' ' 

Friends, you know the teachings of the Prince of Peace. I 
charge that the Christian Church has taught too little in the 
spirit of Christ. It has feebly succumbed to the fear of 
offending worldly powers. It has stifled its voice and its 
conscience when it should have mightily resisted the spirit 
of the age, its commercialism, its militarism, its social 
injustices, its lust for blood and conquest! This awful 
war did not originate in a country nor on a conti- 
nent we Christians are pleased to call heathen! Let us sit in 
sack-cloth and ashes and wait humbly before the Lord ! Let the 
fires that are now purging the nations also purge the Christian 
Church. Let her search for Truth, pure and undefiled! Let 
more consecrated men and women of great ability enter the 
ministry! Let the Church abandon its literalism and its empty 
ecclesiasticism ! Let her be filled with the One whose optimism 
was unshaken by disaster ! Let the Christian Church henceforth 
know only Christ and Him crucified! 

We all commit the fundamental error against which Tolstoi 
warned us when he said: "We constantly think there are cir- 
cumstances in which a human being can be treated without af- 
fection. There are no such circumstances!" 



III. What will the future world situation be? It will be 
a very different world. It will be a world of twice-born men! 
It will be a different and a better world. 

Political, social, and economic disintegration are now taking 
place in Europe on a scale inconceivable to us here, and per- 
haps even to them. And when the twenty million men return 
home from the trenches there will be a reintegration of society 
and of state on an entirely different basis. The Christian 
Church, too, must be reconstructed or it will perish! The ma- 
jority of these twenty million men are of the laboring class. 
They have been trained to take from the enemy by violence what 
could not be obtained by argument or reason ,and they have seen 
violence succeed ! And what of the millions of women, emanci- 
pated by this horrible cataclysm, who have tasted liberty, who 
have taken their places as independent economic factors in the 
commercial and industrial world, while the men were away at 
the front? Are they going tamely back to their former life of • 
subserviency and helplessness. These problems of the future 
are too big to be treated here this morning. But it is certain 
the old order of things is going — has gone. The guns that bat- 
tered down the forts at Liege in August, 1914, demolished more 
than cement and steel — the old social order collapsed at the same 
time. 

War compels men to face the ultimate realities of existence. 
"Ah!," I was told by some French prisoners with whom I talked 
in Heidelberg, "out there (meaning the battle-field) it makes 
one think!" That's it, thinking! These twenty million are 
thinking as never men thought! Only eternal verities interest 
them. Shams deceive them no longer. The intellectual and 
spiritual changes of a generation are being compressed into two 
years. They are living with an intensity we here in Lotusland 
have no conception of. The thin veneer of civilization was torn 
off early. Those men are living and acting on their primal in- 
stincts. In the convulsion that has taken place in their souls 
everything unnatural, artificial, has been swept away. Has 
faith in Jesus Christ gone too? Heine prophesied the revival of 



-8— 



the pagan faith of the Germanic aborigines: "The day will 
come," said he, "when the old stone Gods will arise from the 
silent ruins and rub the dust of a thousand years from their 
eyes. Thor with his giant hammer will at last spring up and 
shatter to bits the Gothic cathedrals." Did not the iconoclasm 
of the French Revolution banish the Christian Church from 
France and set up the worship of Reason? Who will dare to 
fathom the depths of the spiritual regeneration now taking place 
in Europe and Asia? 

When peace finally comes to these nations in their external 
relations, there will follow grave internal disturbances over a 
period of years. Poverty, hard poverty, will afflict them. The 
public debt of France now exceeds ten billion dollars and is 
rapidly increasing. Germany and Austria owe nearly as much. 
Russia is hopelessly insolvent. England is spending one billion 
dollars every month of the war. The taxation to pay the in- 
terest on this debt and to keep the governments going will crush 
the people. But with poverty will come the virtues of poverty, 
simpler pleasures, more self-denial, more unselfishness in social 
and home life. More seriousness will characterize society and 
men will learn that money can buy pleasure but it cannot buy 
happiness. Family ties will be stronger. For a world of sham 
and self-indulgence, we shall see a world of industry and self- 
sacrifice. The simple faith of the fathers will be renewed in 
its pristine beauty and power. The triumph of patriotism over 
selfishness oti the battlefield will continue in the halls of legis- 
lation and the courts of justice. And the universal mourning 
for the untimely dead will mellow the hearts of men in all the 
afflicted nations, and will awaken, let us hope, a new sympathy 
and a new sense of human brotherhood. Yes, the pre-war world 
and the post-war world will be essentially different! Just now, 
"the Time is out of joint," but we shall all yet see the glory 
of the Lord. 

IV. You have often heard it said this country is to be the 
conservator of civilization from the great cataclysm. The 
thought flatters and pleases us. Friends, let us not lull our- 



—9— 

selves into inaction with any such vain delusion ! It is belieing 
Nature and Providence to believe that the agony and sacrifice 
of the Old World will be fruitless of great human good. We, 
in the United States, shall henceforth be the representatives and 
the type of a cast off social order! Must we, too, go through 
the same dreadful furnace of death and destruction to purge us 
of the old dross? Shall we match their reformed governments, 
efficient, democratized, freed of corruption, seeking only the 
common weal, with our old machinery of state that creaks at 
every joint, with its lynchings, its inefficient administration of 
justice, its swollen fortunes, its social iniquities, its selfish and 
corrupt demagogy? For their Christian Church, sanctified by 
many tribulations, the active friend of mankind and seeking not 
its own, shall we present ours still arrayed in purple — unser- 
ious, self-satisfied, ease-loving, and clinging to its idols of creed 
and tradition? Brethren, we must act, we must act quickly. 
Strike to the right and left! We can hardly hit amiss. Then 
amid the debris let us fall to our knees and dedicate ourselves 
more unselfishly to the service of others and more consecratedly 
to the will of the risen Savior. For "there is none other name 
under heaven given among men, whereby we must be saved. ' ' 

It is not fair to say that, in view of this great calamity that 
has befallen the World, Christianity has failed. Christianity 
cannot be blamed for failure, because it lias never been tried. 
Had there been any big body of Christians in the belligerent 
countries, this war would have been impossible. But, praise 
God, in Europe things will be different — Will they be different 
here ? 

I appeal to you as educated men and women, above all to those 
of you who have been leaders in scholarship here in this great 
institution of learning, to give some thought to the momentous 
religious and social problems of our time. In a colorless age of 
frivolity and superficiality, I would give you as a watchword 
the one Lord Chesterfield in a similar age suggested to his son, 
the one word, " Approf ondissez ! " Go to the bottom of things! 
We are drifting. In religion we have almost become lacka- 



-10— 



daisical. As individuals we are failing to get the most out of 
life because of a general attitude of moral complacency and in- 
tellectual torpidity. God rouse us! Last week I received a 
letter from a young French cannonier, written at the front amid 
the thunder of a thousand guns and the shrieks of the lacerated 
and the groans of the dying. "Ah!," he writes, "if I ever 
escape this hecatomb, how I shall know the meaning of living! 
I used not to think that there was any special joy in breathing, 
in opening one's eyes to the sun and receiving its light. I be- 
lieved there were only certain hours that had any particular 
value or were worth remembering. I let the rest slip by. If I 
see the end of this war, I shall know how to seize upon them all, 
how to enjoy all the passing seconds of life, like delicious and 
refreshing waters that one feels gliding through one's fingers. 
It seems to me that I shall stop every hour to cry out, ' ' I live, I 
live, I live!" Something of this young French hero's earnest- 
ness and intensity of conviction is what I plead for in all of 
us. Since he wrote, a shell may have carried him away and he 
may have learned his lesson too late. If he survives, he will in 
time be one of the great men of the nation. Must we learn the 
lesson he has learned only by paying the same terrible price? 
It is not necessary. It depends on us. Goethe tells us that at 
thirty he resolved "to work out life no longer by halves, but in 
all its beauty and totality ' ' — 

"Im Ganzen, Guten, Schoenen 

Resolut zu leben." 
And so may we do, ever remembering that 
"We live in deeds, not years, 

In feelings, not in figures on a dial, 

In thoughts, not breaths; 

We should count time by heart throbs! 

He most lives who thinks most, 

Who feels the noblest and acts the best." 



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